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Hyper-Typing
In this article, I talk about an inherent trade-off in TypeScript's type system: stricter types are safer, but often more complex. I describe a phenomenon I call "hyper-typing", where libraries - in pursuit of perfect type safety - end up with overly complex types that are hard-to-understand, produce cryptic errors, and paradoxically even lead to unsafe workarounds. I argue that simpler types, or even type generation, often lead to a more practical and enjoyable developer experience despite being less "perfect".
The strictness even allows us to remove the if check inside the function, since now TypeScript gives us the compile-time guarantee that obj will always have property key: The resulting types, however, are a complex mess, and the compilation errors produced when the caller deviates from the happy path are walls of inscrutable text. It pushes heavily on type-safety, promising “first-class TypeScript support with outstanding autocompletion” for a “smoother development experience”.
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